My All-Time Favorite Comic Strip

I first started to follow Doonesbury, the long running comic strip by Garry Trudeau, in the mid-1970s. As a boy, my knowledge of contemporary American politics was very limited. I had heard of Watergate, but didn’t know any of the important personalities in that scandal or even why it was ‘bad.’ In retrospect, I wonder what preteen Robert got out of Doonesbury. It wasn’t a simple, appealing-to-all-ages comic strip like B.C. or The Wizard of Id, or one beloved by small children like Peanuts. Doonesbury fairly quickly caused me to become familiar with the political issues that were on America’s mind just as I was becoming old enough to give a shit.

My early exposure to Doonesbury gave me a pretty common misconception about the strip—that it had a radical political point-of-view. Part of the reason I thought this was that one of the characters, Mark Slackmeyer, was kind of a cliche of a campus radical, and another, Zonker Harris, depicted another counterculture cliche—the stoner. My misconception partly came out my thoroughly bourgeois upbringing, but also that American society seemed to have slotted Doonesbury into that radical humor role. I learned from Trudeau & Doonesbury that Garry Trudeau was not only not a political radical, but was a thorough-going preppy.

His high school years were spent at St. Paul’s prep in New Hampshire, a blue-blooded all-male school that educated members of America’s elite class since 1856, with graduates like J.P. Morgan, John Kerry, and John Lindsay (both Kerry and Lindsay appeared in Doonesbury in 1971).

Trudeau was destined to go to one of the Ivies, and ended up at Yale where his classmates included the cream of America’s prep schools, like his classmate George W. Bush, who had attended Phillips Academy at Andover. Trudeau majored in art at Yale. Art lovers think of artists like Richard Serra or Eva Hesse when we think of Yale, but Garry Trudeau is by far the most famous Yale MFA recipient. I remember thinking this a little weird because among comics fans like me, Doonesbury wasn’t known for its amazing visual style. But Trudeau could really draw as this high school drawing from St. Paul’s demonstrates.

When it was a campus strip at Yale and through its early years, Trudeau employed a sketchy, somewhat simplified drawing style perhaps in homage to the greatest political comic strip artist of the 60s, Jules Feiffer. (This artistic imitation carried on down to the way Trudeau employed word balloons. Like Feiffer, he dispensed with this semantic staple of the comic strip.) The “can’t draw” complaint was also leveled against Trudeau because if he was doing a strip depicting a conversation between two White House figures, he would draw the same view of the White House over four panels. When Trudeau returned from a sabbatical from Doonesbury in the early 80s, there was a noticeable improvement in the layouts of the strips—they no longer featured figures exclusively in profile seen from a mid distance, usually cutting off their lower legs. They existed as figures in space seen by a roving camera angle. The unkind rumor among comics fans was that Trudeau was using a ghost to draw the strip at this point, which was “confirmed” when it was revealed that Trudeau (like almost every other comics artist) used an assistant named Don Carlton to ink and letter is strips.

This visually complex strip from 2004 has the meathead jock character BD after he is injured in Iraq shows how sophisticated his comic strip storytelling had gotten over the course of 30 years drawing. In the comics world, such a succession of panels is sometimes called “cinematic” and was a hallmark of such cartoonists as Milton Caniff and Will Eisner.

Only comics fanboys like myself fixate on the visual aspect of Doonesbury—most of the reading public has focused on its political content, which is important obviously. But for me as a lifelong fan, I found the greatest pleasure in the more soap opera aspects of the strip. Doonesbury started as a strip full of campus highjinks, from a profoundly male point-of-view. In the early years, the only regular female character was Boopsie, BD’s airhead cheerleader girlfriend. Trudeau’s view of women was pretty unenlightened when he started Doonesbury. The transformation of Trudeau’s view of women is a major theme addressed in Trudeau & Doonesbury. By expanding the cast to include more female characters, his characters could pair off and start families and careers—the dynamics of which would form the majority of the strip from the mid-70s until the present.

Mike Doonesbury eventually graduated from Walden College and got a real job in advertising and was married to an artist J.J. Perennial stoner Zonker Harris is forced to take a post-college job as Mike and JJ’s nanny. At the time, Trudeau spoke of forcing his amiable post-collegiate cast to “grow up,” although Zonker’s career as a nanny showed that his ambition wasn’t up to the task of the 80s.

At this point in Kendall’s biography, Doonesbury is depicted as a series of presidential terms and Trudeau’s response to each. I think even long-time fans like me started experiencing diminishing returns over the course of the 90s and 2000s. For America, the Gulf War was a minor little hick-up in America’s long history of foreign adventurism. But for Trudeau, it was a life-changing experience.

It was kind of a shock for those of us who remembered Trudeau’s anti-Vietnam War roots to see him cheerlead for a war. Like many of us who were suckered at that time, there was a successful effort to portray Saddam Hussein as uniquely evil—like a Hitler or a Pol Pot—that Trudeau was convinced by. This is my gloss on Kendall’s just-the-facts recounting—Kendall doesn’t editorialize. Trudeau even wrangled a press pass from the Defense Department to go to Kuwait. Like Milton Caniff after Pearl Harbor with Terry & the Pirates, Trudeau turned his strip into a well-researched support vehicle for members of the U.S. Military.

When G.W. Bush became president, it was personal for Trudeau. He had a longtime personal dislike for the feckless son of of another president, but that somewhat evaporated when G.W. so vigorously supported the troops after 9/11. This is where B.D.’s character has his lower leg blown off by an IED. Trudeau followed the path a soldier who suffered that kind of injury goes along, including on-the-ground reporting from the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where B.D. would go to first, then reporting from Ward 57 of Walter Reed, where military amputees go for rehab. Trudeau also reported from a Fisher House, the houses where military families can stay while their soldier family member is receiving treatment at a V.A. Hospital. And these strips were followed by a lengthy sequence about BD readjusting to home life with Boopsie, and inevitably, Zonker. BD develops serious PTSD, so the strips have an opportunity to deal deeply with that particular aspect of military life.

That this switch in emphasis came so late in the life of Doonesbury is noteworthy. Usually when a cartoonist makes such a major change to his or her comic strip, it is early enough in the strip’s tenure that the longtime fans who might be bothered by such a change don’t really exist yet. It was still a soap-opera domestic comedy mixed with commentary on the political trends of the day, but the lives of soldiers became a major part of the Doonesbury of the 2000s. Trudeau’s wife, Jane Pauley, attributes Trudeau’s sensitivity to the mental struggles of veterans with her own struggles with mental illness, that resulted in hospitalization in 2000.

Kendall’s biography is more journalistic than literary or critical. My own comments about Trudeau’s drawing and how the strip became more visually adventurous are not the kind of thing he writes about. He’s not a comics guy, which I am and so is Trudeau. I was intrigued to learn just how preppy Trudeau was and about his personal trip to feminism—those were not stories I already knew. Ditto with Jane Pauley’s mental illness (which was not a secret—she wrote a memoir about it). Linking it with Trudeau’s lengthy fixation on PTSD was a revelation.

Furthermore, I am of the opinion that for the good of America, Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend Donald Trump must release everything related to the Epstein case (unredacted), disband ICE, and resign.

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